With advances in medical technology and medical instruments, many abdominal surgical operations have come to be performed using a laparoscope. Since laparoscopic surgery is performed by viewing a three-dimensional object displayed on a two-dimensional monitor screen, training is indispensable to the acquisition of the required skill. In actual laparoscopic surgery, the surgery must be planned so as to match each individual patient because the number of blood vessels, the directions of the blood vessels, and the positional relationship among organs, for example, the position and size of a tumor, differ from patient to patient.
One possible method to make a preoperative simulation possible is to use a simulator adapted based on information acquired of each individual patient.
To acquire information of each individual patient, it is common to use medical image data such as CT (Computed Tomography) or MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) data, but in this case, only geometrical information can be acquired, and the physical and dynamical conditions cannot be acquired. Further, in laparoscopic surgery, the position or orientation of the patient during actual surgery is different from that of the patient during CT imaging, and thus the positional relationship changes. Furthermore, since the images of lymphatic vessels, membranes, etc., cannot be captured by CT, these parts cannot be modeled, resulting in the problem that a model that does not incorporate such parts is unsuitable for use in a preoperative simulation.